Strength of the UK’s Armed Forces

Lord Beamish Excerpts

Wednesday 14th April 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mr Kevan Jones (North Durham) (Lab)]

Will my right hon. Friend give way?

[John Healey]

I will give way one more time, but then—conscious that nearly 40 Back-Bench Members wish to speak—I will make some progress.

[Mr Jones]

The hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex (Sir Bernard Jenkin) mentioned budgets, but is not it a fact that the defence budget has been cut by nearly 25% since 2010? Even with the increase that has been announced recently, the defence budget is now 5% lower than it was in 2010.

[John Healey]

My right hon. Friend is right, of course. There has been an £8 billion real-terms cut to the defence budget since 2010. That is part of the reason that we have seen 45,000 full-time forces cut over the last decade. I will return to some of those points.

For now, I want to make this point: we can destroy enemy forces with technology, but we cannot seize and hold ground without troops. Drones and robots do not win hearts and minds; they do not mend broken societies; they do not give covid jabs. These deeper cuts now planned could limit our forces’ capacity simultaneously to deploy overseas, support allies, maintain our own strong national defences and reinforce our domestic resilience, as we have seen our troops do to help our country through the covid crisis. Other countries have expanded troop numbers even as they develop technology. They do not see this as a “manpower or machines” question, but as personnel and technology together. Although high-tech weapons systems are essential, highly-trained personnel are simply indispensable, and size matters.

These planned cuts are damaging for four reasons. Let us call them “the four Rs”. The first is resilience. Cutting Army numbers reduces the UK’s national resilience by reducing our capacity to react to unforeseen circumstances at home and abroad—not just major wars, but insurgencies such as Afghanistan, international interventions such as Sierra Leone or Kosovo, and emergency support operations such as post terrorist attacks or during covid.

The second “R” is readiness. The rapid response required to the unexpected also requires highly-trained, adaptable, cohesive combat troops, which even the best reserves, called up as last-minute reinforcements, cannot provide.

The third “R” is renewal. The fewer troops and full-strength battalions we have, the less able the Army is to sustain long campaigns. Northern Ireland, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan and Iraq all required the long-term rotation of troops. We are a leading member of NATO. We are one of the P5 countries at the UN Security Council. We may again be called on to deploy and sustain forces away from the UK. We may not seek a major crisis, but we may well face a major crisis that comes to us.

The final “R” is reputation. The current Chief of the Defence Staff said in 2015 that the ability to field a single war-fighting division was

“the standard whereby a credible army is judged”,

yet the fully capable division mandated then, including a new strike brigade, will not be battle-ready for another 10 years according to evidence that the MOD gave to the Defence Committee in the autumn. A former CDS, General Sir David Richards, has said that further cuts to the Army would mean that the UK was

“no longer taken seriously as a military power”

and that this would

“damage our relationship with the US and our position in NATO”.

My second argument is that this is not just about numbers. In the face of growing threats and the increasing ambition for the global role that our armed forces will play, there is a strong case against, not for, some of the Government’s short-term capability cuts. Taking two Type 23 frigates out of service in the next two years will reduce the Navy’s anti-submarine strength. Ending the RAF’s E-3 planes will leave a two-year gap in airborne early warning before the E-7 Wedgetails come into service in 2023. The Army is losing nine Chinook helicopters, 14 Hercules transporter planes and 20 Puma support helicopters.

The third argument is one that I am sad to have to make, and it is this: we are faced now with more of the same. After a decade of decline since 2010, which the Prime Minister called an “era of retreat”, the Defence Secretary promised that this defence review would be different from the last two Conservative defence reviews, which weakened the foundations of our armed forces. They were driven by finances, not by threats, cutting full-time forces by 45,000 and cutting critical defence capabilities and upgrades, alongside plans for full capability forces in the future that have not been fulfilled. I fear that this defence review simply makes the same mistakes of the past.

Fourth and finally, in November, when the Prime Minister announced the extra funding as part of a four-year funding settlement, we welcomed it as promising a long overdue upgrade of Britain’s defences, so we are dismayed now by more defence cuts, despite this £16.5 billion boost. But I guess it is not hard to see why. The defence budget was balanced in 2012, and the equipment programme was fully funded, but Ministers since then have lost control. The National Audit Office has now judged the defence equipment plan unaffordable for the last four years in a row and reports a black hole of more than £17 billion over the next 10 years. This black hole in the defence budget has grown by £4 billion in the last year, on this Defence Secretary’s watch. The MOD’s annual report and accounts suggest that the annual marginal cost for 10,000 Army personnel is around half a billion pounds. This deficit alone each year could cover the cost of maintaining Army numbers three times over.

The new defence budget is not all it seems. Ministers talk about the rise in capital funding but not the real cut in revenue funding over the next four years, which means less money for forces’ recruitment, training, pay and families. It means a possible cut of 40% to the budget of the Office for Veterans’ Affairs. Worse still, over half this year’s £16.4 billion defence equipment budget is revenue-based for equipment support and maintenance. This revenue cut is the Achilles heel of defence plans. No other Whitehall Department is projected to have a cut in day-to-day spending between now and 2024-25. The Defence Secretary should never have agreed it.

This defence review and the defence and security industrial strategy announce nothing new that Ministers are doing to get a grip of the MOD’s budget failings and to make the most of this big, one-off opportunity from the extra funding. So I say to the Minister: get to grips with the budget, consider the concerns raised, rethink the plans and report back to Parliament before the end of June. Britain was promised better, Britain deserves better and Britain needs better from its Defence Department.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Kevan Jones (North Durham) (Lab)]

In 1962, Dean Acheson, the former Secretary of State, said:

“Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role.”

In the 1960s, we concentrated our efforts in defence and foreign policy on protecting western Europe during the cold war and on our commitments to NATO. The integrated review was billed as a way of the Government defining what was meant by global Britain. The review is ambitious, but in a lot of ways, it looks backwards to an age with a certain amount of sentimentality and a rose-tinted view of Britain’s place in the world, without the resources to meet the ambition it outlines. In the maritime space, for example, we have a situation where global Britain is going to be projected by only 19 capital ships, and possibly fewer than that, throughout the mid-2020s. In order to have credibility, global Britain will also conduct operations in areas of the world in which we have never done operations before. We cannot do that without resources and without the people to do that.

I just ask the Government to be honest with the British people. If this integrated review is to be enacted, it needs the resources behind it, but I am concerned that in the race for the Government to meet this nostalgic view of Britain’s place in the world, they will take their eye off the real ball, which is our commitment to NATO and the north Atlantic and the main threat, which everyone agrees is there today—we have seen it today in Ukraine—which is from Russia. We cannot do that without the resources or the people.

Given this Government’s track record in coalition and in Government, the integrated review did not come from a standing start; it was from a start that has seen cuts to the defence budget that mean it is 5% lower than it was in real terms in 2010.

I will finish by saying this: we are all proud of our men and women in our armed forces, but we should not make them empty promises that we cannot deliver. We certainly should not have a situation where we ask them to do things without the resources and the capabilities that they rightly deserve.

--- Later in debate ---

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)]

I get the idea of grey-zone warfare. I studied strategy; I realise that we cannot fight the next war as we fought the last war—I get that, too. The real problem is that we are going to have to do the next war in a different way. I get that. But we have not fought a total war as envisaged, and on which the integrated review is predicated, for over 70 years. Instead, we have fought limited engagements. We have done counter-insurgency, peacekeeping and peacemaking. Some 99%—almost 100%, actually—of all operations have required us to put soldiers on the ground. Suddenly, we are saying that everything should be predicated on grey-zone warfare, and that leaves little else.

Having commanded men—and women, by the way—on peacekeeping missions, I can tell hon. Members that there is a real argument in favour of having enough of them. We are going to cut our Army by 12%. That is an enormous loss. I understand that tanks can be taken out from over the horizon. The Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict showed that: the poor devils in those tanks didn’t know what hit them. We have to redesign how we fight and where our tanks go—I get that. But it does seem odd that we are saying tanks are somehow obsolete when we have aircraft carriers that are 500 times bigger and marked from space by a red dot that an intercontinental missile could take out very fast.

I will end by saying how disappointed I am that my Government have cut the regiment I commanded in Bosnia, without even telling me about it in advance—not even one little word. It was dreadful, and it hits me personally. So if I am talking with emotion, so be it. The 2nd Battalion the Mercian Regiment did not deserve that, when you think that, per head of population, each Scot has three times as many battalions as each Englishwoman or Englishman—the Scots have three times more infantry battalions than we do in England.

[Mr Kevan Jones]

And they’re all Fijians.

[Bob Stewart]

And indeed, as my good friend says, they are Fijian. Increasingly, those battalions will have to be manned by Englishmen.

I will end on that point. I understand the logic; I disagree with the result.

--- Later in debate ---

[Johnny Mercer]

No, I am not going to give way. [Interruption.] No, no, no.

[Mr Kevan Jones]

On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. I will take your advice, but is it in order to call a Member disingenuous?

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

If I had heard anything that was out of order, I would certainly have called it into order. It is part of the debate.